I made a short video showing the functionality of the Hunter Cloaking Device for the Infiltrator. Many have said that it is all but worthless, however this is a misunderstanding that the cloak is intended to be a permanent invisibility cloak, when in actuality it functions as a highly advanced ghille suit. This assumption also fails to take into account that Planetside 2 is an MMO in addition to an FPS. At level 1 the infiltrator is somewhat proficient, at higher levels in his class ability (in this video Rank 3 260 Certs) his role becomes readily apparent. I've made some notes on the thought process that went into the play on this video, however i hope it inspires people to examine their options before too quickly deeming a feature/weapon/ability useless. Remember Planetside 2 is still a fresh game and there are a world of strategies and tactics to discover.
A light assault has other flanking options, yes, but better is in the playstyle preference of the player. This obviously isn't a skill video, just a video to demonstrate that across multiple players (presumably with multiple different setups) an infiltrator can actually cloak and maneuver. While the LA has a great advantage to mobility and can reach places the infiltrator cannot, the infiltrator can shed the enemy spotted beacon and continue infiltration in a situation where an LA would be dead the moment his jetpack ran out of fuel. The classes in this game aren't competing against each other though, each has its own style and should be examined individual in addition to being compared against others. Some say the LA infiltrates better than the Infiltrator and i agreed until i decided to try for myself.
And? Seriously, and? All it takes is 1 person in that crowd to be paying attention and you're dead. That you took a video of an outlier situation means NOTHING. How about the other 5 times you tried this and died? I kill a ton of Infiltrators trying to pull similar stuff off. You're banking on everyone in the crowd you run into being a BR1 who doesn't know what an Infiltrator looks like yet whenever you do something like this. Sometimes it pays off, often it doesn't.
I'd rather discuss what actually happened in the video rather than what could have happened. Many people assume the cloak offers invisibility at all motion levels and i'm attempting to demonstrate cloak's value at close range at low motion levels. Could someone have seen me? Yes. They also could have had night vision or a friendly grenade could have gone off. Sometimes it pays off and sometimes it doesn't, in the same manner that sometimes you jetpack right over a tank and succeed in getting a kill and sometimes you run out of fuel, or sometimes you manage to drop mines on a sunderer as an engie and sometimes you get spotted and gunned down. Almost every awesome situation in the game could have been prevented if someone were paying a little more attention. In any video something could have gone wrong, but it didn't. Instead of endlessly discussing what could have been why don't we discuss what did happen and how to replicate it. I'm certainly going to be giving it another go this evening when I log on, but i'll tell you that even if i can never replicate it again i've generally made more discoveries discussions that trend "how can we make this work" in the attempts to replicate perhaps someone will learn some quirk about the cloak we didn't know, or something completely different that i can't even think of. "This is what could have happened" is a dead end, it doesn't lead to any new ideas. On that note, is there anything you think i should do differently for my next attempt?
What your video showcased was you being overlooked by a large squad of enemies long enough to kill one of them before dying. The LA player in the video I linked managed to be completely ignored multiple times over a single play session by far more people, without access to any kind of cloak. What this says to me is that the Light Assault's fairly generic character model is a more powerful tool than Hunter Stealth, and that there is no special tactic involved here aside from basically ignoring the enemy players near you in the off chance that they might mistake you for an ally. This thread hasn't convinced me of anything, because I've played the game both as an Infiltrator and against them, and I know precisely how visible we are with medium to high graphics settings. I've never been shot in the back by someone playing the class except while running through enemy controlled territory, and the only times I manage to sneak past anything are those when I'm simply not seen at all, with or without cloak.
Nice video! You did everything a good infiltrator should do: You made use of cover You made use of distractions You didn't treat the cloak like an "invisibility" power, you treated it like a "camo," which is exactly what it's supposed to do (like you said) Rite dere, dat's 'ow a right proppa' infiltrashun's dun. You'ze a sneeeeakygit, ain'cha? Ahh, you again. I don't see how your argument works. Of course, if someone had been actively searching for the infiltrator, he probably would have found him--he was right in front of his nose, after all--but you saw that they were all distracted. That's what an infiltrator should do--make use of every advantage he/she can get to sneak past the enemy. This isn't Halo. You don't use the cloak to go invisible, you use it to aid you getting around unnoticed. It wasn't designed for you to simply walk past an entire group of enemies and stay undetected, it was designed to aid in moving around unnoticed. You still have to make use of available cover, time your movements, know when and where to uncloak--all those things every proper spy game expects you to do. Treat it like a camo--use it to blend in, but don't expect it to make you wholly invisible. And don't you even try to bring up K/D ratios as an excuse, that is completely irrelevant to everything in this thread.
As an excuse? Clearly you don't understand the reasoning. Credibility is everything. So far we have a video of someone getting 1 kill and then dying, and a guy praising someone for pressing "F" and then running into a crowd of inattentive enemies at night (that's what he did, he didn't use some advanced tactics like you said he did). Pretty sure neither of you have done anything to prove the majority wrong. Anyone can post on the forums pretending that cloak functions perfectly fine, the thing is none of you actually put it into application anywhere near as effectively ingame as you pretend you do on the forums. That's what K/D ratio proves.
Why would you use Halo as the one example of proper invisibility when it's one of the only games with an imperfect stealth mechanic like this one? Even when you're completely motionless in Halo, you can still be seen by the light-bending shader effects. The only differences between this game's stealth and it, are that the energy drain on Halo's stealth is actually dependent on how quickly you move, and it's subtle enough to actually hide you. Well, that and you also get to shoot without waiting to break cloaking first. I might not agree with Gunshooter's past insistence on K/D ratios, but he's completely right to question your credibility. How am I supposed to take this seriously when you don't even get your own examples right?
I explained what i did and the reasoning in a play by play in the description of posted video. I really am not sure why the level of hostility in this thread has gone up, but i'll point out that we're all talking about planetside 2, a video game we play for fun and enjoyment. The video was shot by me after reading a thread about how terrible the cloak was and attempting to see for myself. The 1 kill was because i'm not a great shooter, i believe i mentioned that in the video- but also because i was standing face to face with an enemy wondering when he was going to see me and wondering if i should decloak and shoot or hope he passed by. You'll notice that i'm such an extraordinary gamer that my cloak ran out while i was deciding and i ended in an untimely death. A player like me managed to get this video once, i wonder what a great player might accomplish if he saw the video and thought "hmm, maybe i'll see if i can do that better". Out of all the "cloak is broken" conversations i've found scant few suggestions on how to use the cloak in the game in it's current state. I can't make SOE code faster, or prioritize what i want prioritized so i'm going to figure out a way to use and enjoy what we have to work with now, and later be thrilled if something new and better comes along. I suppose i see it as a challenge, most games that have stealth as an option intentionally make it difficult to make it balanced, and make the gameplay designed around a slow methodical playstyle. I'm thinking SOE has a similar mindset for the infiltrator, but again since people believe invisibility cloak mean a total release from careful mobility (and rightfully so as SOE has made obtaining solid information very difficult, however probably unintentionally) they are finding less than optimal results.
I agree with what you said--I never said K/D ratios don't prove anything--but what's in this thread just doesn't mesh with K/D ratios. Imagine this: An infiltrator sneaks into an enemy tech plant. Using nothing but his/her wits, he manages to sneak past the battle outside, through all the enemies inside, and overloads the generator. He/she then is killed as the enemy rushes back to the generator to figure out what the heck all the noise is about. However, his/her actions allow their empire to swiftly move in and crush all resistance, due to the tenacity and skill of this one infiltrator to take the shields, at the cost of their life. K/D ratio of the infiltrator at this time? No kills. Success of the infiltrator in their mission? Hell yes! You see, K/D ratios are only a measure of killing. If you're good at killing people, that's great! You don't have to be a total killing machine to be useful, however--and neither do you have to just hang back and repair or heal. You can undertake actions such as the one I pointed out--support and tactical operations that help your empire win the battle. Sure, you can't prove it the same way you can say "I get an average of 15 kills per death!" but you still managed to be an asset to your team--in this scenario, a pivotal one. I will apologize, I came off as overly hostile in my other post, but it's hard to get the intent when you're reading text. However, K/D ratios don't prove everything, they're just one facet of the game; how big of a facet it is, that's subjective, but it's still only one part.
So you respond to my post about how worthless theory is with more theory? A hypothetical situation that sounded awesome in your head, but that in actual practice would do nothing aside from give the enemies 100 free exp for a generator stabilization and get you killed. Yes, doing that would be totally worthless and reflect poorly on your skill and decision making as a player. Unless you managed to hold out until it blows, in which case you'd get kills which increase your kill/death ratio. K/D ratio is hardly everything, but if you're going to go against the norm and tell the vast majority of players that they're wrong, you certainly better have something to back it up with other than theory. A video of someone utilizing the cloak to get a single kill is not good enough. Even a video of someone utilizing cloak to get 20 kills would not be good enough - i've done that plenty of times before, and all that I would be doing is selective editing because the other 10 lives where I got 2 or 3 kills and then died would not be shown.
You're right--they are similar, and I know that, and I knew that when I posted. It's in the playstyles. Halo is a very twitchy shooter, and you use the Invisibility as, well, invisibility. You activate it to quickly get past enemies, so you can shoot them in the face, or the back, or wherever you prefer. Halo's maps are, by design, not very large and open, so you'll most likely encounter your foes in close quarters--hence, the playstyle. The infiltrator, by nature of the loadout and the game, requires a very patient playstyle. You'll be using cloak to sneak undetected, break spotting, and get to that perfect sniping position. You'll need to keep your distance, and the maps in PS 2 allow you to do so. My point was that you can't use the cloak the same way you'd use it in a game like Halo. Even though the mechanics themselves are both quite similar in comparison, the design and pacing of the two games are quite different. You are right, however. Perhaps I should have pulled a different example--maybe Mass Effect? It wouldn't be as confusing then.
Ok stop right there. You clearly have the wrong idea about why people complain about the cloak. It's certainly nothing to do with how useful it is to a sniper Infiltrator. It's to do with how useless it is to, well, an Infiltrator Infiltrator.
Once again, I agree with you! Like I said before, I came off way too hostile in the first post. Also, like I said, there's not much you can do to prove you did something like this, other than take a video or something. I don't have such a video, so I can't say much here. You made your point. I'd like to point out, though, that regardless of whether or not you take kills, if you accomplish the mission, you did your job. The kills are irrelevant--yes, you're probably going to have to take some if you're going to hold that generator until it blows, but if you didn't have to, that's okay. You still did your job. I think we're getting off-topic, though. The point of this thread wasn't about K/D ratios, it was about the cloaking. And this current topics seems destined to start fights--and I never wanted to start a fight. Can we agree to disagree?
That may be true but i'm really not sure that the best time to close the book on that is one month into playing in a game where certs increase the effectiveness of abilities. Double XP extravaganza just ended and people have certs lying about. Not everyone has interest in testing mechanics, but please don't take some people's interest in the game they enjoy as a personal affront or an attack in some way. It's very possible to disagree without being disagreeable and if you think the idea has no chance of succeeding that's a fair assesment that might be right. Perhaps if you check back in a while you can confirm that the attempt was indeed misguided, but for now i'm really not trying to at all be better than anyone else or "prove" anything really. I've presented a situation that's interesting and now people are free to attempt to replicate it and will most likely post what they find. The video doesn't mean i think the new hot cloaker tactic will be a head on assault of giant squads, i simply used that as a test of some of the mechanics. I learned that i can fool some enemies through slow movement/motionlessness which is in line with what the developers have said about how the cloak is intended to function. Now that i know that i'll probably go out and test exactly which range which movement mode is effective. I've personally found that a run is fine at around 50M but at somewhere around 30M it's walk unless you're sure all targets are looking in another direction. Perhaps someone will read this and give me their experience and give another idea to test. It's all about learning more about the game as is. Anyone have any suggestions on methods/techniques for better cloaking? Does anyone have maxed cloaking that might like to chime in?
Mass Effect... doesn't even have competitive multiplayer. Not that it matters, though, because you're outright wrong about this on several points: Firstly, the Infiltrator requires patience but demands haste. A fixed 12 second duration on our stealth makes it worthless for hiding, yet it's only even remotely effective when doing so. Sneaking around implies that we're going somewhere with the cloak active, but move even an inch and you enter the highly-visible "please kill me, I can't shoot back" mode, even if you didn't even mean to. Second, is this ludicrous insinuation that the map allows you to keep your distance. Sure, you can keep your distance from a minor territory if you don't mind having only a limited view of the courtyard and one window near the cap point. Good luck contributing to the war effort like that, especially when you need to be indoors to do anything of importance in Bio Labs, Tech Plants, and Amp Stations, not to mention all of the outlying points surrounding those bases. A majority of space in this game is indeed large open stretches of land, but this is where only a miniscule fraction of combat takes place, let alone infantry-based combat. That's not a good enough reason to give us only one stealth mechanic which doesn't function indoors.
